Course Reflection

Hello everyone, I’m back again for my final blog post of the course. I thought last week’s post would be my last, but I’ve found out I need to make another.

Overall, I think I learned a lot from the course. I feel like I achieved my goal of getting better at interpreting the texts, but I still found some of the texts quite difficult to understand. I found last week’s book Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli particularly difficult to understand. The switching between stories made this book particularly confusing for me. The class discussion did help clarify a lot of the confusion I had, but I still think more could have been done to guide the reader through this complexity (perhaps labels when switching). On the other hand, there were several books in the course that I felt I generally got a good grasp of after reading. I particularly enjoyed Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia for the amount of action it had throughout it, and the showdown at the end had me on the edge of my seat for a long time. I also really liked Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago because of its moral and philosophical complexity. It is probably the book I thought about most after reading it, and that is partly why I’d rank it as my favourite book I read in the course.

Not only do I think this course helped me improve my ability to read difficult books, but I also think it helped me read faster. Going into the course, I was really slow at reading. I would only get through about 30 pages an hour, which was simply too slow given the weekly reading load in this course and took away too much time from working on my other classes. I started to get better at scanning lines better while still understanding what was happening, which I think is a valuable skill that I will use going forward.

Apparently, the common theme of growing up and adolescence was not intended to be a theme in this course, but I really enjoyed reading these stories. Combray by Proust at the very start of the course got me to reflect on my childhood and how tough it was for me to grow up and rely on my mother less. I found Deep Rivers by Jose Maria Arguedas quite relatable, as it showed some of the struggles that come with being picked on at school. Though Agostino by Alberto Moravia was quite uncomfortable at points, I’m quite glad I read it, as I think it addresses a difficult period that many young boys go though.

In case you missed my previous blog post last week where I ranked all the books I read in the course, here is my ranking along with a short explanation about what I did or did not like about them:

1. Death with Interruptions by Jose Saramago – Brilliant and thought provoking
2. Money to Burn by Ricardo Piglia – Action, action, action
3. Deep Rivers by Jose Maria Arguedas – Fantastic and engaging plot
4. Agostino by Alberto Moravia – Uncomfortable, but I’ve never read anything quite like it
5. The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda – Highlights tragic circumstances of war
6. Combray by Marcel Proust – Made me think of the difficulties of growing up
7. Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt – Great and deep plot, didn’t really like the ending though
8. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector – Unique and fairly interesting
9. The Shrouded Womanby Maria Luisa Bombal – Interesting, but ghosts are confusing
10. The Trenchcoat by Norman Manea – Confusing to read, requires a lot of external context
11. Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli – No plot/action, didn’t understand the point

Question: What are your thoughts on my rankings? Did you have another favourite book of the course (perhaps one I didn’t read)?

Thanks for reading my last blog post and take care,
-Nathan